Monday, August 26, 2013

We Gank Because We Care

What about our chances? Will people learn or they just ignore us as "Goon alts"? I wrote the teaching page that was linked in my Bio. It was linked nowhere else before, you could only find it in-game after my ganks as a gank target or as a reader of local channel. Still it got 200+ hits. Gank targets and those who are in local while a gank happened do want to learn!

Of course not all of them, there are sad setback when they refuse to take responsibility for their fate:

Please read the corp announcement before applying, I had to disable recruitments in the weekend because many people wanted to join without having a clue what the corp is. Don't do that!

How big impact can one man do? How many miners can be reached?

You know what "August" means? This Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and only Sunday was full day, the others were just normal evenings.

My favorite gank wasn't one of the 1B+ pods, that's pure lottery. My favorite is this Retriever. While it had no proper rigs or Adaptive Invulnerability, it had a Damage Control II, which made it impossible to kill the pod in 0.6. Killing a Ret alone is not profitable. Why did I still proceed? Because saving your pod doesn't help if you are so AFK that it will be floating there 15 mins later.

22 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Gevlon, you will never teach people if you aren't more diplomatic. The people you blow up are angry at you. You have to sugarcoat the message for it to be accepted. Insults are to be expected. Reply with snide comments - even if they are 100% right! - will get you nowhere. You should have said something like "listen, I know this really sucks for you, but I will be happy to tell you how to fit your ship better. If you prefer, we can talk about this later". It's not perfect, but at least he *might* have listened.

If you really believe in your teaching mission, really spend some time thinking about how to talk to angry people.

I have to admit that it sounds like a good opportunity to learn.As most highsec stations are camped by bored snipers waiting for criminal targets or people they are allowed to shoot, I'm curious how you will prevent yourself from being ganked.You will tank your Catalysts as you want to show people how to avoid beeing an easy target, won't you?Yes, I do know that Catalysts are cheap to replace, but losing 3 T2 fitted Catalysts on your way to a gank would mean you lose as much ISK as a Retriever pilot without any tank.Not counting clone upgrades as most won't stay below 900k SP.

If you will fit your Catalysts for "no tank - max gank" (and I'm sure you will), don't call others dumb to use greedy fittings as you do the same.There is no difference between "no tank - max gank" and "no tank - max yield" or even "no tank - max cargo".

Not sure how to translate it... "don't teach what you don't do yourself"That's what the best teacher in my life told me.Don't teach others to protect themselfes while flying unprotected ships to teach them.

A greedy Retriever without rigs and 3 MLU II will pay for itself within 2 to 3 hours. Of course a singe DCU II won't kill your yield, but it even won't prevent you from being ganked if someone wants to gank you.

I'm very interested in how your project will work.

I would like to call you another group you should be aiming at:Minerbumpers

12 hours ago "Izzie Perfekt" had fun flying his Stabber Fleet Issue and bumping iceminers in Osmon... until I posted his fitting in local.Uh, I was dumb to fit a passive targeter and a ship scanner on my Procurer, dropping half of my tank while there is an interdiction going on... but I didn't even had the chance to dock and switch to my Catalyst as moments later:http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=19377001

I'm sure he won't fit a tank or at least weapons to his bumping ship in the future... because every ship will explode some day and instead of stupidly tanking you should always fit your ship to get it's mission done.

Instead of fitting a Retriever the way you are suggesting it on your teaching page, you should always fit it for max yield. If you are afraid of ganks, fly the Procurer.If you want tank on a Catalyst, fly a cruiser instead.If you need to move expensive assets, pay Red Frog / PushX instead of tanking your industrial.

@Osmon Iceminer: Station campers are easy issue: use an insta-undock bookmark. The only way to lose your Catalyst on the undock is being lazy (I managed to do that this weekend, learned from it).

The Catalysts aren't tanked because you can't tank against Concord. They are meant to die. Retrievers can be fitted the same way: they mine and left to die if anyone ganks. Fitting a Mackinaw that way is dumb.

So my RL friend plays with me in Eve. He likes to mine and enjoys it. (I am more of a mission runner care bear type) He told me today how he got ganked in his Makinaw this weekend. I being a fairly avid reader of your blog remembered your entry describing gank resistant miners and sent him a copy of your fits with my condolences on his ship. Now hours later reading this entry, I suddenly wondered if you had blown him up so I looked it up and sure enough you ganked him.

"The tanked retriever retains its AFK-mining ability (Procurers need constant attention) while it's tanked against 1-2 Catalysts."Any retriever, no matter the fit, should go down to a T2 catalyst in anything lower than a 0.8 if you've prepped the system.

I'm currently mining in 4 untanked miners though, and I refuse to learn, thus your corporation is a fail.

@Lucas: no. A retriever fit of my guide has 18.2K EHP against Therm/Kin. In a prepped 0.5 system you have 25 seconds, demanding 728 DPS to kill. That is doable only if you have a perfect-skilled pilot with 100M worth of implants and even then you can't get the pod (killing a ret alone is not efficient). If it's boosted by an Orca, it's not solo killable period.

In 0.6 you can't kill even the ship alone.

ECM drones mean that one ganker can be disabled, so even a 2-ship gank has serious chance of failure.

How about combining this corp idea with the fleet bear idea? You could offer an assitance fleet made up of your corpies to any nulsec alliance who would like to hire such help on a case-by-case basis. Your corp could be blued for the duration of the OP, and after having left the field and returned to its low sec staging system, un-blued again. Would eliminate the awoxing issue of the fleetbear corp as well.

Gevlon, whether you "sugarcoat" your message like anonymous wants you to, or just give them the bald truth, you're going to get mainly responses like Albert's.

It's all your fault, certainly none of his for flying an untanked mack, and you're a horrible faggot choking on cocks, and you could have just left him alone, etc. etc. ad infinitum.

They're not going to learn, because they don't want to learn. They expect hisec to be totally 100% safe. They're entitled to it, don't you know. That's your problem, you're trying to teach a bunch of entitled children that they aren't entitled to a goddamn thing, and they do not want to hear that message. So they're going to ignore it and blame all their problems on you. Sound like anyone we know?

You're beating your head against the same brick wall that James 315 and his new order are, except they're just trolling the shit out of those guys. You missed the point somehow and are actually trying to "save" them. They don't want to be saved. Just kill them and enjoy the tears.

@Gevlonno. A retriever fit of my guide has 18.2K EHP against Therm/Kin. In a prepped 0.5 system you have 25 seconds, demanding 728 DPS to kill

Sure, you can do that, but then the gankers just use thrashers. Gankers will exploit your resistance gaps, so either you have to resist everything or simply make more isk than your ship is worth before it is ganked.

@SjonnarMost of then don't feel "entitled". Pricks like you put the words of entitlement if their mouths, because that's how you imagine they are. A lot of them simply don't realise how many people run around ganking for no particular reason. Gankers for profit don't generally kill miners as there's no profit in it, which means the people that gank them are either part of some campaign, or are simply doing it because they want easy ills with no chance of repercussions.A lot of the time it's the gankers that feel entitled. They feel that any changes that jeopardise their ability to cause huge amounts of damage with nearly no time or isk investment is carebearing. Look at how many gankers were up in arms when the barge changes came in for example. Personally I think the level of damage a low SP pilot can do in a ship as cheap as a destroyer is pretty unbalanced. Ganking should take skill and effort, but it literally takes a week old alt or two and a couple of million isk to do.

Instead of ganking people and then telling them what they did wrong, why not use that enormous pile of cash to buy a load of properly fit mining ships and give one to each of the miners you see 'doing it wrong'?

Hell, you could even give them a ship after blowing up their first one, instead of leaving them to start the cycle again.

Just one look at the comments made in this article and those on the miner bumping site show that ganking causes people to rage quit. Better for the game to educate them, help them and then grow the user base.... unless of course you just like the tears.....

@Lucas: there is no EM resistance gap, just a bit lower resistance. Trasher DPS is lower, so it's harder to kill it with trashers.

Also, are you posting miner tears here?

You seem to ignore something. I don't blame you, I ignored it for more than a year: profit is measured in not "ISK in your wallet" but "ISK on your killboard". In that sense ganking miners is extremely profitable.

You don't "have" to do anything. But the goal of communication is to transmit a message. The sugar coating is like outing proper stamps on a package in the mail. A somewhat annoying step, but necessary.

If you have the right message but the message isn't accepted, you're just losing your valuable time. You might as well have written gibberish.

@Gevlon"You seem to ignore something. I don't blame you, I ignored it for more than a year: profit is measured in not "ISK in your wallet" but "ISK on your killboard". In that sense ganking miners is extremely profitable."Very few gankers measure that. Most gankers are killing for loot drops. So they can get more isk, so they can buy more and better ships so they can hit bigger targets or otherwise have more fun. You seem to think that everyone in this game is here to pick a metric and then dick measure against each other, and you keep jumping in to try to prove your worth. It's just not the case.As much as you hate it and as much as you don;t believe it, most people play for fun - and that's it. Some have fun ganking, some have fun mining, some have fun in PVE, etc. There's only a very few people that are simply playing to get a high isk count, or a high killboard number.

Again, you're clearly not a people person, so I don't blame you for not understanding the way other people think, but the way you measure everything is someone only a very small minority care about. Honestly, you'd do better on Asian servers where more people try to farm to generate income.

I can see your campaign is doomed to failure if you continue like this.

MMO's like EVE bank heavily on the delayed gratification effect - in this case, an entire month of (what was probably) piddly Venture mining to scrape up the cash for a proper ship that'd let him make more money. Losing that big payoff minutes after you first get it is a nasty, nasty blow. Its even more frustrating because he didn't see it coming - he was in highsec and he wasn't seeking out fights. He didn't even know he had to defend against this sort of thing. We all know how angry we get when games blindside us with punishments like that - and in EVE the punishment can be very stiff indeed.

The victim is hurt, in a very real way. Your goal is to use that hurt, to drive home the point: they never want this to happen again. Instead, you do the worst possible thing by insulting them. "Its YOUR fault!" Man, you just wrote a blog post arguing passionately that it's not their fault; that it's ignorance, not stupidity, that plague most miners. That's the underlying premise of your entire endeavor with this corp!

You've argued that Goons are not really griefers - and you're right. The financial goals of Goon Interdictions are clear. You, on the other hand, purport to be doing this for the victim's own good; which consists of punishing them, and then ridiculing them for not knowing how to avoid punishment. Even the alt's name feeds into this; "Botslayer." John315's hilariously over-wrought persona (THE CODE) exists deliberately to make him look as much like a self-righteous cunt as possible, because that makes the insult all the more keen to the victim (and is a classic exercise in 'trolling,' because if you can see through the front, you get to be in on the joke, instead of the victim.) You, on the other hand, are comporting yourself with the same asshole persona but you actually believe in it, which either makes you a raving cunt, or someone who doesn't appreciate the value and necessity of communication.

Communication is my profession in real life. I wouldn't purport to lecture you on game economics; for the same reason you shouldn't dismiss a diplomat's take on game diplomacy. You've got an extensive social network in this game; utilize it. Recruit someone to draft a standard pitch that you can copy-paste into a private convo; and draft a standard EVE-mail that has the greatest chance of inducing someone to click on it. Outreach is the entire point of your new corp; so work on that. T2 Blasters only reach 1.5k but an EVE-mail can travel across the galaxy.

I generally like the idea of your corp, though I don't know how effective at actually teaching it will be, but it fits with my idea of what EVE ought to be like.

Your guide is also relatively good overall, but one thing I'd like to point out: "Does 10% more income worth 600% more ganks?" Depending on how often you get ganked, it quite possibly is worth it. You can't just compare 10% income to 600% cost and conclude that it's a bad trade off. If the cost is much lower than income, this could well give you more net. Let's take extremes, and say your retriever will never ever get ganked, so the cost is 0, and the mack costs 200 mil every time you get ganked, in exchange for 3 mil extra income an hour. This is still a perfectly profitable trade off to take if you get ganked less than once every 70 hours.

It probably is true that in certain areas, you'll get ganked often enough to make flying untanked max yield juicy ships unprofitable, but that doesn't follow directly from comparing cost increase to income increase.

The vast majority of the cfc needs teaching how to gank. How do you propose to get through to these 'elite' as the vast majority seem unable to do anything without a considerable group (ie they are a bit dense). However I expect you have given up on educating the cfc grunts as they are beyond redemption.